September

September wears its history in its name: septem, seven, the seventh month of the old Roman year that opened in March, a number it kept even after January and February were set ahead of it and the count slipped by two. The same is true of its three companions, October, November and December, so a third of the modern year still counts itself from a first month that has not been first for well over two thousand years.

Emperors repeatedly tried to claim the month and failed. Caligula renamed September Germanicus for his father; Domitian, born in October, took September as Germanicus and October as Domitianus for himself; the Senate offered Tiberius the month and he refused it, reportedly asking what they would do when there were more emperors than months. Every one of these names was abandoned, most of them the moment their author fell, and the plain number outlasted the whole dynasty of vanities, which is why the failed renamings are remembered chiefly as a lesson in how calendars resist power.

In the Roman religious year the month belonged to Jupiter. The Ludi Romani, the oldest and greatest of the public games, filled its middle weeks, and at their heart on the thirteenth stood the epulum Iovis, the banquet of Jupiter, at which the images of the Capitoline triad reclined at table with the magistrates of Rome. The games had begun as a votive offering vowed before battle and became the fixed centrepiece of the civic religion's autumn.

The autumn equinox, on or near the twenty second of September, balances the year and carries the month's oldest living observances. Japanese Buddhists keep Higan in the equinox week, as they do in spring, visiting and cleaning the family graves; the name means the other shore, the far bank of the river of existence, and the level crossing of the sun is read as the moment the two shores stand nearest. Modern Pagans keep the equinox as Mabon, the second of the three harvest stations of the Wheel of the Year, a name applied to the festival in the 1970s from a figure of Welsh legend.

The fixed feasts of the month climb toward its end. The Nativity of Mary on the eighth is one of the oldest Marian feasts, nine months after the Immaculate Conception in the reckoning of the Western calendar. The Exaltation of the Holy Cross on the fourteenth descends from the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 335 and gathered to itself the memory of the recovery of the relic of the cross from Persia in the seventh century. Michaelmas, the feast of Michael and All Angels on the twenty ninth, was a quarter day of the English year, when rents fell due and geese were eaten, the archangel's feast woven into the working calendar.

September also usually opens the Jewish Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah falls in the month more often than not, beginning the ten days that close with Yom Kippur, so the month's equinoctial balance often coincides with the season of judgment and return.

Sources Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory ParadigmMark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (eds) with The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE to Tenth Century CESacha Stern